SF Masterwork of the Week: Gateway
It seems fitting, following the death of the great Frederik Pohl, that his best-known novel, Gateway, is our new SF Masterwork of the Week. As winner of the Hugo, Nebula and John W. Campbell Memorial Awards, among others, it is clearly a major touchstone in the genre. And to tell us about it, courtesy of our good friends at SFX magazine and their excellent SFX Book Club feature, is Gareth Powell: gentleman, scholar and creator of the only World War II flying ace who can peel fruit with his feet, Ack-Ack Macaque . . .
GATEWAY by Frederik Pohl
What would you buy if you won the Lottery? For Robinette Broadhead, protagonist of Gateway, the answer is adventure and escape, and the chance to make even more money. He wants to get away from a short, dirty life spent mining shale, so he buys a one-way ticket to the eponymous space station, which is an ancient artefact filled with thousands of abandoned spaceships.
Little is known about the alien builders of Gateway – a mysterious race dubbed the “Heechee” – but humanity has figured out how to start up their abandoned spaceships; now a thriving gold rush is afoot as volunteers ride these ships into the unknown, seeking their fortunes. A ride on a Gateway ship is the ultimate gamble: the controls are unfathomable, the ships follow preset courses of unpredictable length, and your chances of returning alive are only one-in-three. Some crews simply vanish, never to be seen again; some come back with their blood smeared all over the cabin walls by unimaginable forces; others starve because their food and water runs out before the ship returns to base. But of course, there are always a few gamblers who think they can beat the system, and the otential rewards are huge, as returning pilots are handsomely paid for new discoveries.
At the start of the book, Robinette (or “Bob”) is back on Earth again, years after his time on Gateway, having apparently survived his experiences and made his fortune. His story is presented to us through a series of exchanges with his robot psychiatrist, Sigfrid. Chapters alternate between their discussions on Earth and Robinette’s first-person account of his life on Gateway, through which we – like Sigfrid – slowly begin to piece together the truth of what happened on his fateful final flight.
The trouble is, Bob isn’t a very reliable narrator, and there are some things he doesn’t want to talk about. Sometimes he’s downright evasive. All we know for sure is that he suffers from a crippling sense of shame. Bob seems to despise himself, and it’s not just survivor’s guilt. He seems to hate himself for some of the sexual choices he’s made. For him, sex is bundled up with guilt and self-loathing. Since making his fortune, he’s been throwing himself into hedonistic romps with bimbos to suppress his misery. But does that misery derive from his suppressed homosexuality, or something deeper?
As Bob slowly recounts his tale, Pohl brings the echoing corridors of the Gateway station to life, painting a brittle portrait of men and women suffering from the psychological stress of living in a claustrophobic and potentially-lethal alien environment. Memos and personal ads dot the narrative, adding flavour. When not out risking their lives in space, the denizens of Gateway throw themselves into sexual experimentation and gambling. They are obsessed with games of chance, and none more so than Bob. His very presence on the station has come as the result of a lucky lottery win. Life, Pohl seems to be telling us, is all about chance and coincidence. We may have free will, but only to the extent that we get to decide how we’re going to respond to the hand we’ve been dealt.
Gateway deserves its reputation as a classic (it won the Hugo, the Nebula, and the John W Campbell awards). The plot zips along at an agreeable rate, but it’s the central figure of Bob who keeps us turning the pages. We view the marvels of the universe through the eyes of a flawed everyman, and we root for him to succeed, despite already knowing that (on some levels) he does; we feel his discomfort as he squirms ever closer to revealing the events of his final trip, and the decision he has been forced to make. We know something terrible happened to him, and Pohl cleverly uses our trepidation to draw us unstoppably onwards. Like watching a car crash in slow motion, we’re wincing in anticipation of what we may discover but, at the same time, we dare not look away. Even though he’s flawed and sometimes makes bad decisions, we’ve come to like Bob, and we’re worried what he might have done.
Gateway is available as an SF Masterworks paperback, and you can read more about Frederik Pohl in his entry in The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction.
This piece was written by Gareth L. Powell and appears courtesy of SFX magazine, where it was originally published as part of their regular SFX Book Club feature. You can subscribe to SFX magazine here and find more Book Club articles here.
Gareth L. Powell is the author of the novels Ack-Ack Macaque, The Recollection and Hive Monkey. You can visit his website at www.garethlpowell.com and follow him on Twitter at @garethlpowell
